Quotes from Jackie Kay

It's as if my footprints were already on the road before I even got there.I walk into them, my waiting footprints.

Sometimes you remember your life in photographs that were never taken.

When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive.

Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence right next to me. I look at it. It doesn't look like anything, that's what is so strange. It just fits in.

My father had a lifelong terror, phobia whatever, about hospitals. Makes a lot of sense in hindsight. He was so scared of doctors, he passed that on to me. That's what parents exist for: to pass their phobias on generation to generation.

It's as if my footprints were already on the road before I even got there.I walk into them, my waiting footprints.

She walked on and on as though if she walked far enough she might walk this thing out of her. As if by walking long enough, hard enough, she might forget.

When it rains like that, dark in the afternoon, you feel like you've been taken into the past.

I didn't feel like I was missing anything. Nor did I feel ambitious any more. It all seemed stupid wanting to be better than the others in the same ring, shallow, pointless.

Weather here in this part of the world is just as moody, just as subjective and disloyal, as people.

Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence.

How bizarre, i think to myself, to be on a train and to actually not want to arrive anywhere? What kind of madness is that?

Some men fall in love with a woman, Some women fall in love with a man, Some men fall in love with another man, Some women fall in love with another woman - But I, my dear one, fell in love with Shetland. - Shetland

I know I am capable of loving to the full capacity, of not being frightened of loving too much, of giving myself up and over

The terrible thing about pain is that it doesn't matter, it still hurts. It hurts like hell.

Life is too short to argue about time.

The tall trees, compassionate, understood everything: grief - they stood stock-still, branches drooped in despair; fear - they exposed their many roots, tugged their gold hair; anger - they shook in the storm, pointed their bony fingers. - The World of Trees (inspired by the Forest of Burnley)

Writers give readers courage – the courage to be utterly your complete and complex self. (In reference to Audre Lorde)

They never tell you about that either. How the hardest thing a mother has to do is give her child up, let them go, watch them run.

Time feels as if it is on the other side of me now, way over, out across the sea, like another country. I don't live inside it any more and it doesn't rule me.

The heat comes off the music.

More than anything else, more than your body, or the food you eat, you are your teeth. Life is a journey from milk teeth to false teeth with fillings and crowns thrown in in between for relief.

The beautiful have so much easier a time of it than the ugly, don't you think? They get smiled at the whole time. Strangers offer them things. People notice the beautiful; the beautiful are constantly acknowledged.

You noticed things. You're not sure when you start. It's only when you've noticed - noticed that you know you've noticed. Maybe between the first time when you're staring to think, Is this what I think it is? and the second time when you think, Yes, between those two times, there's a silence. A pause.